Neftalí Sillero

• PhD
• Universidade do Porto at University of Porto

Coastal ecosystems are under increasing threat, with the accumulation of marine debris-particularly plastics posing significant ecological risks. Oceanic islands are especially vulnerable due to ocean currents depositing marine debris on their exposed shores. This study presents the first assessment of marine debris accumulation on sandy beaches of...

Marine turtles’ nesting grounds face imminent threats from urbanisation, climate change, and pollution. In this study, we estimated the vulnerability of loggerhead turtles (Caretta caretta) nesting beaches in Cabo Verde, one of the largest rookeries globally. We surveyed 61 sandy beach segments (~ 100 m) with a drone and modelled nest density by in...

Powerlines pose a significant threat to many bird species, impacting their conservation. Current research focuses on developing methods to mitigate bird mortality due to electrocution and collisions with powerlines. In this study, we designed a sound prototype to be installed on infrastructure poles, including powerlines, aiming to reduce their use...

Marine mussels are one of the most important sources of cultivated shellfish worldwide, particularly among middle- and low-income countries where they are a key food source for coastal communities. Climate Change is bound to have a large impact on the distribution of suitable habitats for the mussel species cultivated throughout the world. To exami...

Global trends in marine turtle nesting numbers vary by region, influenced by environmental or anthropogenic factors. Our study investigates the potential role of past temperature fluctuations on these trends, particularly whether warmer beaches are linked to increased nesting due to higher female production (since sea turtles have temperature‐depen...

Aim: Amphibians are particularly sensitive to rapid climatic shifts, due to their eco-physiology, life history traits and high frequency of narrowly distributed species. The genus Speleomantes encompasses the only extant Western Palearctic plethodontids, with three species occurring in peninsular Italy and the remaining five endemic to Sardinia Isl...

Assessing biodiversity in protected areas is essential for effective conservation management. However, conventional methods for estimating species richness can lead to inaccurate assessments of biodiversity in these regions. To address this, we present a complementary approach to assess potential species richness at a 1 km resolution in the special...

Ecological niche models (ENMs) are a powerful tool to predict the spread of invasive alien species (IAS) and support the implementation of actions aiming to reduce the impact of biological invasions. While calibrating ENMs with distribution data from species’ native ranges can underestimate the invasion potential due to possible niche shifts, using...

Roads are an important source of human economic progress, but also a threat to wildlife populations and natural habitats. Roads are responsible for the direct mortality of hundreds of millions of animals worldwide, with special negative effects for amphibians. Since the middle of the twentieth century, various types of mitigation measures have been...

Species distribution models (SDMs) have proven valuable in filling gaps in our knowledge of species occurrences. However, despite their broad applicability, SDMs exhibit critical shortcomings due to limitations in species occurrence data. These limitations include, in particular, issues related to sample size, positional uncertainty, and sampling b...

Land-use land-cover (LULC) change contributes to major ecological impacts, particularly in areas undergoing land abandonment, inducing modifications on habitat structure and species distributions. Alternative land-use policies are potential solutions to alleviate the negative impacts of contemporary tendencies of LULC change on biodiversity. This...

Broadleaf water milfoil (Myriophyllum heterophyllum) is an emerging invasive alien plant in Europe, and thus a priority for European Union (EU)-level surveillance, monitoring, and eradication. This species is native to North America and threatens aquatic ecosystems by creating dense stands that can fill an entire water body, leading to high economi...

A detailed understanding of the way free-living organisms interact with their biophysical environment can provide improved insights into the impacts of climate change on animal populations. Reptiles, as ectotherms, are particularly vulnerable to thermal fluctuations, which makes them excellent candidates for studying the links between individual ph...

The MontObEO research project implements a standard methodology to monitor biodiversity in the Natural Park of Montesinho (Northeast Portugal). The framework estimates species vulnerability by analysing trends (Mann-Kendall test) over time (2001-2022) of the habitat suitability index from a set of ecological niche models (Maxent) calculated with a...

This report is a product of the COST Action CA18221 PERIAMAR, PEsticide RIsk AssessMent for Amphibians and Reptiles As part of the pesticide risk assessment, a characterization of the exposure of amphibians and reptiles to pesticides is necessary. In the first-tier assessment, it is common practice to estimate pesticide exposure using worst-case sc...

Assessing biodiversity in protected areas is crucial. However, conventional methods for estimating species richness can lead to inaccurate assessments of biodiversity in these regions. To address this, we present a complementary approach to assess potential species richness at a finer resolution (1 km) in the special conservation area of Montesinho...

Ecological niche models (ENMs) are a powerful tool to predict the spread of invasive alien species (IAS) and support the implementation of actions aiming to reduce the impact of biological invasions. While calibrating ENMs with distribution data from species' native ranges can underestimate the invasion potential due to possible niche shifts, using...

COVID-19 lockdowns had strong positive and negative effects on the environment and biodiversity. The most evident effects were the occurrence of wildlife in the middle of urban settlements, the reduction of noise, and the improvement in air quality. However, other effects on species are less well known. Our main question is: did species habitat sui...

In this work, we present and describe a spectral library (SL) with 15 vascular plant species from Montesinho Natural Park (MNP), a protected area in Northeast Portugal. We selected species from the vascular plants that are characteristic of the habitats in the MNP, based on their prevalence, and also included one invasive species: Alnus glutinosa (...

Roads represent one of the main sources of wildlife mortality, population decline, and isolation, especially for low-vagility animal groups. It is still not clearly understood how wildlife populations respond to these negative effects over space and time. Most studies on wildlife road mortality do not consider the spatial and temporal components si...

Background The special area of conservation Montesinho/Nogueira (SAC-MN) is a key area for biodiversity conservation in the Iberian Peninsula. Covering an area of approximately 1081 km² in the northeast of Portugal mainland, the SAC-MN is home to a wide range of species, including several endemic and endangered species and priority habitats. Despit...

Santa Luzia, an uninhabited island in the archipelago of Cabo Verde, serves as a natural laboratory and important nesting site for loggerhead turtles Caretta caretta. The island constitutes an Integral Natural Reserve and a Marine Protected Area. We assessed marine litter accumulation on sandy beaches of the island and analysed their spatial patter...

The world is experiencing an environmental crisis due to human-induced habitat loss. To face it, ex-situ monitoring offers plenty advantages. Here, we combined ecological niche modelling (Maxent) with satellite remote sensing time series to implement a cost-effective methodology for estimating the habitat suitability trends of six emblematic specie...

The continuous growth and movement of the human population is increasing the frequency of translocating species from their native ranges to novel environments. However, biological invasions offer a rare opportunity to investigate how species can colonise and adapt to new conditions. In that sense, Ecological Niche Models (ENMs) can be a powerful to...

Species distribution models (SDMs) have proven valuable in filling gaps in our knowledge of species occurrences. However, despite their broad applicability, SDMs exhibit critical shortcomings due to limitations in species occurrence data. These limitations include, in particular, issues related to sample size, positional error, and sampling bias. I...

The Montesinho Natural Park (MNP) is one of the largest protected areas in Portugal, covering an area of 74,225 hectares in the extreme northeast of the country. MNP hosts a wide range of endemic and highly threatened species and priority habitats such as oak forests, meadows, grasslands, and bushlands. However, human activities continue to pose a...

Plastic pollution is a global environmental issue affecting multiple ecosystems, namely sea turtle nesting grounds. We analysed the potential chemical contamination caused by plastic debris in loggerhead turtle (Caretta caretta) nests, focusing on polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs, a class of flame retardants). For that, we conducted a field ex...

Precision agriculture (PA) and yield gap (Y g) analysis are promising strategies to achieve the desired sustainable intensification of agricultural production systems. Current crop Y g approaches do not consider the internal field yield variability caused by soil properties. Topographic and edaphic characteristics causing consistent high and low yi...

Studying changes in temperature is fundamental for understanding its interactions with the environment and biodiversity. However, studies in mountainous areas are few, due to their complex formation and the difficulty of obtaining local data. We analysed changes in temperature over time in Montesinho Natural Park (MNP) (Bragança, Portugal), an impo...

Ecological niche models (ENMs) are a powerful tool to predict the spread of invasive alien species (IAS) and support the implementation of actions aiming to reduce the impact of biological invasions. While calibrating ENMs with distribution data from species' native ranges can underestimate the invasion potential due to possible niche shifts, using...

The special area of conservation Montesinho/Nogueira (PTCON0002) is a key area for conserving biodiversity in the Iberian Peninsula. Covering an area of approximately 1081 km² in the northeast of Portugal mainland, the PTCON0002 is home to a wide range of biodiversity, including several endemic and endangered species, and priority habitats. Despite...

Disentangling the multiple factors that shape the ecological niche of a species is often difficult, especially when in contact with other similar and potentially competing species. Ecological niche models (ENMs), albeit originally developed for environmental factors only, can help in assessing competition by comparing the niches of ecologically sim...

Roads can negatively impact ecosystems by fragmenting habitats and affecting animal movements and behaviour. One of the major noticeable effects of roads is animal mortality by vehicle collisions, a paramount threat to wildlife, especially for amphibians. In the context of reduced water availability, particularly in the Mediterranean region, amphib...

The continuous growing and movement of the human population is increasing the frequency in translocating species from their native ranges to novel environments. However, biological invasions offer a rare opportunity to investigate how species are able to colonise and adapt to new conditions. In that sense, Ecological Niche Models (ENMs) can be a po...

Quantifying rarity at the intraspecific level is an important task for conservation biologists because rare phenotypes have a higher extinction risk than common ones. However, quantitative assessments of rarity are lacking at this level, preventing to adequately protect rare and endangered variants that are part of the pool of common species. Our a...

The R language provides most applications (packages) currently available for ecological niche modelling. In the last few years, these packages have increased substantially. There are now numerous packages for computing ecological niche models (ENMs) with different algorithms, comparing species niches and niche models, creating virtual species, gett...

ContextEvaluating herpetofauna presence and the species-specific and species richness patterns in response to agricultural landscape features is essential for understanding the herpetofauna decline in agricultural landscapes.Objectives This work aimed to explore how different categories, extent and heterogeneity of crops affect herpetofauna distrib...

Many small lizards live in structurally and thermally heterogeneous environments where they can select preferred microhabitats and surface temperatures to optimize their activity. We examined microhabitat selection and analyzed surface temperatures selected by two ecologically similar lacertid species, Iberolacerta horvathi and Podarcis muralis, at...

Coastal urbanization, plastic pollution and climate change are increasingly affecting marine turtles' nesting habitats. In addition to facing risks of mortality due to saltwater inundation or predation, their eggs and hatchlings' might also be affected by plastic debris accumulation on beaches, but no studies to date have analysed such impact. To a...

Species distribution models are valuable tools for conservation management. However, there remain challenges in developing and interpreting these models in the marine environment, such as the nature of the species used for the modelling process. When working with mobile species in dynamic environments, lack of observation is usually interpreted as...

Context To understand the herpetofauna decline in agricultural landscapes with herpetofauna presence and evaluating the species-specific and species richness patterns in response to their features. Objectives This work aimed to explore how different crop categories (i.e. agroforestry, irrigated, dry and woody crops and pastures), crop extent and he...

Climate change has strong effects on biodiversity. It causes shifts in the species' geographical range, towards other latitudes or elevations, while tracking its natural habitat. Here, the species maintains its realised niche stable (in the environmental space) and shifts its geographical range. Alternatively, a species might shift its realised nic...

Species are shifting their elevational ranges in response to climate change. Elevational shifts have been documented frequently in many species of flora and fauna but very few times in amphibians and reptiles. Here, I compare 74 transects in the western part of the Central System mountain range (Salamanca province, Spain) sampled in two periods: 20...

The slow-worm lizards (Anguis) comprise five species occurring throughout most of the Western Palearctic. Although these species are relatively uniform morphologically – with the exception of A. cephallonica, which exhibits a quite unique morphology – they are genetically deeply divergent. Here, we provide detailed distribution maps for each species...

Global biodiversity is facing a never witnessed extinction crisis worldwide. One of the biggest challenges to deal with this crisis of biodiversity loss is the lack of efficient and viable monitoring systems across scales. Unlike traditional in situ biodiversity monitoring, a usually costly and time-consuming enterprise, satellite remote sensing (S...

The use of correlative ecological niche models has highly increased in the last decade. Despite all literature and textbooks in this field, few practical guidelines exist on the correct application of these techniques. We present here a step-by-step guideline explaining best practices for calculating correlative ecological niche models considering...

Citizen science data are becoming increasingly relevant in wildlife studies, especially when obtaining data requires costly logistics. In the Arabian/Persian Gulf, baseline information about cetaceans is scarce despite their regular presence. From 2012 to 2019, a citizen science campaign conducted in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) obtained informat...

Commercial fruit orchards are embedded in a landscape of native forest and diverse kinds of agroecosystems. The landscape structure of these systems is a major driver of biodiversity response. Generally, it is assumed that high levels of biodiversity occur in perennial systems largely due to their high structural complexity. However, little is know...

Point events can be distributed regularly, randomly, or in clusters. A cluster of points is defined by the distance from which any point included in a cluster is farther from any other point outside the cluster. Many solutions and methods are possible to define clustering distance. I present here a simple method, nearest neighbour index clustering...

The Iberian Algyroides (Algyroides marchi) is a lacertid lizard with one of the narrowest distribution ranges in continental Europe, restricted to a minute area in the Subbaetic mountains in SE Spain. Due to specific habitat requirements, this species is considered threatened by climate change and habitat degradation. Here, an improved and time-cal...

Data on species occurrence at the scale of their distributional range and the determination of their habitat use requirements are essential to support conservation and define management plans that account for their habitat requirements. For wide-ranging species, such as cetaceans, especially considering that their marine habitats include offshore a...

Road networks are the main source of mortality for many species. Amphibians, which are in global decline, are the most road-killed fauna group, due to their activity patterns and preferred habitats. Many different methodologies have been applied in modeling the relationship between environment and road-kills events, such as logistic regression. Her...

One of the biggest challenges to deal with the global crisis of biodiversity loss is the lack of efficient and viable monitoring systems across scales. Unlike traditional in situ biodiversity monitoring, a usually costly and time-consuming enterprise, satellite remote sensing (SRS) data offer a technically feasible and sustainable in time solution....

The Horvath’s rock lizard Iberolacerta horvathi (Méhely, 1904) is an understudied lacertid species, which is geographically isolated from its congeners and currently classified as Near Threatened under IUCN red listing criteria. Due to its limited distribution and narrow environmental preferences, we expect that the species had been affected by pas...

Roads and roadsides provide dispersal channels for non-native invasive alien plants (IAP), many of which hold devastating impacts in the economy, human health, biodiversity and ecosystem functionality. Remote sensing is an essential tool for efficiently assessing and monitoring the dynamics of IAP along roads. In this study, we explore the potentia...

Species can occupy different realised niches when sharing the space with other congeneric species or when living in allopatry. Ecological niche models are powerful tools to analyse species niches and their changes over time and space. Analysing how species’ realised niches shift is paramount in ecology. Here, we examine the ecological realised nich...

Anatolia is characterized by a complex topological structure and a wide diversity of climatic regions. This geological context has been crucial during the evolution of the rock lizard genus Darevskia, promoting the origin of several species within this group of lizards. Our study focuses on the evolutionary history of the rudis species complex, com...

Home ranges in animals can be estimated by different methods like minimum convex polygons, characteristic hulls or kernels while correlative ecological niche models (ENMs) are commonly employed for forecasting species' ranges. However, ENMs can also model the distribution of individuals if environmental very high spatial resolution data are availab...

Biological invasions have increased in the last few decades mostly due to anthropogenic causes such as globalization of trade. Because invaders sometimes cause large economic losses and ecological disturbances, estimating their origin and potential geographical ranges is useful. Drosophila subobscura is native to the Old World but was introduced in...

Ecological niche models (ENMs) are widely used statistical methods to estimate various types of species niches. After lecturing several editions of introductory courses on ENMs and reviewing numerous manuscripts on this subject, we frequently faced some recurrent mistakes: 1) presence-background modelling methods, such as Maxent or ENFA, are used a...

Road-based citizen science surveys are increasingly used for long-term monitoring of wildlife, including amphibians, over large spatial scales. However, how representative such data are when compared to the actual species distribution remains unclear. Spatial biases in site selection or road network coverage by volunteers could skew results towards...

How species are distributed on Earth depends largely on climate factors. Whenever these environmental conditions change, species tend to shift their distributions to reach more favourable conditions. Distinct sets of species similarly distributed (i.e. chorotypes) occur in biogeographical regions with homogeneous environmental conditions. Here, we...

Finding achievable ways to reduce roads' impacts on wildlife is a conservation priority. Road verges may be important refuges for small fauna, making them good hunting sites for predators. These make both prey and predators vulnerable to vehicle collisions. Thus, actions aiming to dissuade these animals from approaching roads are needed. Here we te...

This 381-paged book covers the biology, ecology, impact and management of 34 common alien invasive species, with reviews on the history and context of avian introductions and invasions in five major regions (Oceania, Africa, Europe (including the Middle East, Asia and South America)), as well as management challenges and the potential of citizen sc...

Roads represent a major source of mortality for many species. To mitigate road mortality, it is essential to know where collisions with vehicles are happening and which species and populations are most affected. For this, moving platforms such as mobile mapping systems (MMS) can be used to automatically detect road-killed animals on the road surfac...

Understanding past climate and the mechanisms of climate change remain major challenges in scientific research. The Mutual Ecogeographic Range (MER) method for climatic reconstruction uses the current geographical distribution of fossil assemblages to infer palaeoclimatic conditions. Current species distributions used in the MER method are usually...

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

1. Climate change threatens anadromous fishes such as the allis shad (Alosa alosa) populations of which have declined since the 20th century in Europe. Sensitivity to climate change could be quantified by determining the fish’s spawning behaviour, defined as the timing of reproduction (i.e. spawning events) as a function of temporally variable envi...

Obligate parthenogenesis is found in only 0.1% of the vertebrate species, is thought to be relatively short lived and is typically of hybrid origin. However, neither the evolutionary persistence of asexuality in vertebrates, nor the conditions that allow the generation of new parthenogenetic lineages are currently well understood. It has been propo...

Estimation species extinction risk by analyzing spatial and temporal series of realized niche models based on satellite-only remote sensing-derived variables.